In my personal experience the GPT models have always been significantly better than the Claude models for agentic coding, I’m baffled why people think Claude has the edge on programming.

I think for many/most programmers = 'speed + output' and webdev == "great coding".

Not throwing shade anyone's way. I actually do prefer Claude for webdev (even if it does cringe things like generate custom CSS on every page) -- because I hate webdev and Claude designs are always better looking.

But the meat of my code is backend and "hard" and for that Codex is always better, not even a competition. In that domain, I want accuracy and not speed.

Solution, use both as needed!

GPT 5.2 codex plans well but fucks off a lot, goes in circles (more than opus 4.5) and really just lacks the breadth of integrated knowledge that makes opus feel so powerful.

Opus is the first model I can trust to just do things, and do them right, at least small things. For larger/more complex things I have to keep either model on extremely short leashes. But the difference is enough that I canceled my GPT Pro sub so I could switch to Claude. Maybe 5.3 will change things, but I also cannot continue to ethically support Sam Altman's business.

How many people are building the same thing multiple times to compare model performance? I'm much more interested in getting the thing I'm building getting built, than than comparing AIs to each other.